About Squamish Crag Conditions

Squamish Crag Conditions combines each sector's compass-facing wall direction with live sun position and recent weather to give a rough sun/shade status and a 0–100 “dry score” heuristic for climbing sectors around Squamish, BC. It's meant to help you decide where to head, not to replace your own judgment at the crag.

Crag and sector locations come from OpenBeta's public climbing database. Weather — rainfall, current conditions, and the short-range forecast — comes from Environment and Climate Change Canada's public MSC GeoMet API, read from the Squamish Airport station. Each sector page, and each area's own page, also shows a modeled current temperature and condition specific to that location, from Environment Canada's GEM-HRDPS model via Open-Meteo, plus a comparison of that location's estimated rain against the airport's, from Environment Canada's HRDPA precipitation analysis, and a modeled hourly precipitation chart from that same GEM-HRDPS model, shown alongside the airport's real hourly chart. There's also a location-specific forecast for the coming week — temperature, condition, and a precipitation chart — blending Environment Canada's GEM-HRDPS model for the first day or two with the longer-range ECMWF model beyond that, since GEM-HRDPS alone only looks about two days ahead; days sourced from ECMWF are marked, since they're a coarser, area-level estimate rather than specific to the exact sector. The embedded maps use OpenTopoMap tiles, © OpenStreetMap contributors. The Sea-to-Sky highway camera image comes from DriveBC / DataBC, released under the Open Government License – British Columbia.

The dry score starts at 100 and combines three things: how much rain fell in the last 24–72 hours, how long ago it stopped, and how much direct sun a sector has had since then. It's a heuristic, not a measurement — sun exposure and drainage both vary a lot within a single sector, and the score can't see that.

Best conditions right now (the default) ranks sectors by dry score, highest first — sectors tied on score put sun-facing ones ahead of shade-facing ones, so it's a quick answer to “where should I go right now.” Sun-facing first and Shade-facing first reorder by sun/shade status instead, useful on a hot day when shade matters more than dryness. Name and Area just sort alphabetically. None of these change the underlying dry score or sun/shade status, only the order sectors appear in.

Aspect data is mostly unverified. Only sectors with a manually curated wall direction get a real sun/shade calculation — everything else is marked unverified rather than guessed, and its dry score renders with a ~prefix since it's missing the sun-recovery part of the formula.

Sun/shade status is a rough geometric estimate, not a live view of the wall. It compares the sun's real compass position right now against each sector's curated wall direction, and counts anything within 90° either side as “in sun” — it has no way to know about terrain that blocks the sun despite favorable geometry, like a wall shadowed by a canyon or ridge. It also shifts with the seasons: the sun's path across the sky is lower and shorter in winter, higher and longer in summer, so a sector that's sunny most of the day in August may only catch a narrow window in December. The badge always reflects the sun's actual position for right now, not a fixed assumption.

The dry score and rain history are one regional reading, not per-crag. Environment Canada's station coverage in the Squamish valley is sparse relative to individual crags, so a sector in a rain shadow or a local microclimate won't be reflected there. The modeled current temperature/condition shown on each sector page is location-specific and doesn't share this limitation — though it can visibly differ from the regional forecast above for the same reason (elevation and location), which is expected, not an error. The rain comparison badge is similarly location-specific, but it's shown for context only — it's a blend of radar, gauge, and model data rather than a direct measurement, so the dry score itself still uses the Squamish Airport gauge, not this estimate.

The forecast is Environment Canada's own, shown separately from observed conditions— it's a forecast, not a measurement, and is never blended into the dry score or the sun/shade badges.

The highway camera shows the valley, not the crag. It's a quick visual gut-check on regional conditions, not a view of any specific sector — treat it the same way you'd treat glancing out the car window on the drive in.

Use all of it at your own discretion, and trust what you see when you get there over what this site says.